Enemy of the State

Remember Enemy of the State, (the 1998 thriller starring Will Smith, Gene Hackman and Jon Voight) where Will Smith, a hip, young labor lawyer unwittingly becomes the target of the NSA, tracked 24/7 by satellite and bugs (in TVs, clothes, phones & fire detectors) and hounded by ruthless NSA agents only to be saved by an old ex agent who wants back pay for services rendered long ago. Fast paced, intelligent, well edited and driven by a superb cast, the flick eerily echoes what is happening today, an all seeing surveillance keyed to everyone who lives in the good old USA.

Remember The Office of Total Information Awareness, the 2002 data mining thriller conceived by John Poindexter, the ex Naval officer of Iran Contra fame, whereby said agency would be able to "...provide intelligence analysts and law enforcement officials with instant access to information from Internet mail and calling records to credit card and banking transactions and travel documents, without a search warrant."

The Bush Administration pushed hard to make this real because it "...could be the perfect storm for civil liberties in America,'' said Marc Rotenberg, director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center in Washington ''The vehicle is the Homeland Security Act, the technology is Darpa and the agency is the F.B.I. The outcome is a system of national surveillance of the American public.'' Congress shut the TIA initiative down but like Frankenstein, tech does not die, it just mutates and moves on as needs warrant.

In 2004, Alberto Gonzales and Andrew Card visit John Ashcroft, the ailing Attorney General, to restart domestic wiretapping without the need of FISA. Ashcroft resists because he knows it's illegal but he's recovering from emergency Gall Bladder surgery and James Comey is the acting AG (which short circuit's the Gonzales/Card attempt to get Ashcroft to sign off on the restart) but the BA wants what it wants and re-certifies the program without legal justification.

Needless to say, the furor over the visit (and the end result of doing domestic spying without FISA) has sparked an ongoing constitutional crisis over what constitutes privacy and the role of the executive branch regarding this very important matter. (Here's the real reason for confrontation). Note: Since 2004, the NSA has been reassembling TIA data mining tech with the help of companies like AT&T.

August 3, 2007, the Democratic Congress acts "tough" by giving Bush more than what he asked for regarding surveillance.

In David Brin's Earth, Tit for Tat is the watchword for keeping technology in check whereby the watched can watch the watcher. Why can't we do the same?

Postscript
"Every purchase you make with a credit card, every magazine subscription you buy and medical prescription you fill, every Web site you visit and e-mail you send or receive, every academic grade you receive, every bank deposit you make, every trip you book and every event you attend — all these transactions and communications will go into what the Defense Department describes as "a virtual, centralized grand database." You Are a Suspect - William Safire, NYT November 14, 2002